1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates generally to methods and computer systems for communication between healthcare consumers and healthcare professionals and for managing a healthcare consumer's personal health data. More specifically, the present invention relates to chronic care informatics and to methods and systems encouraging self-management and tools to monitor compliance. In addition, the invention relates to methods for allowing a patient to collaborate with a professional regarding the monitoring and treatment of the patient's chronic health condition, general health and wellness via a computer network.
2. Discussion of Related Art
There are presently numerous devices available to a healthcare consumer, referred to generally as “patient,” for monitoring health conditions at home or other remote locations, such as a patient's workplace or home. Healthcare professionals include doctors, nurses, homecare providers, clinicians, pharmacists, and so on, and are hereinafter collectively referred to as “doctor” or “professional.” Remote monitoring has been one of the more important new practices advocated by the healthcare industry for reducing healthcare costs.
Recently, healthcare costs, including treatment and medication, have been rising at alarming rates for all demographic groups. One illustration of this is recent findings that consumer prices of generic drugs are rising at a faster rate than the prices of brand name drugs. One approach widely recognized for reducing these costs is to improve ways for patients, particularly those with chronic conditions, to collaborate with their doctors and, generally, get more involved in the treatment and monitoring of their own health conditions. One way this has been done is through self-monitoring of their conditions and communicating the data from self-monitoring devices to their doctors.
Monitoring various basic metrics, for example, blood glucose level, blood pressure, key lab tests, medications, and other measurements by a patient outside a doctor's office gives the patient the opportunity to better understand and improve his condition while reducing costs and inefficiencies resulting from frequent office visits. Using diabetes as an example, one type of home healthcare monitoring that has experienced widespread use among diabetes patients is the remote measuring of blood glucose levels, also known as blood sugar. There are several different types of self-monitoring meters for measuring blood glucose and related independent software needed for downloading readings for analysis by a doctor.
Readings and measurements collected by a self-monitoring device are often downloaded by the doctor during a patient visit for analysis and retention in a database. However, although the advantage of self-monitoring devices are widely recognized, the market for such health devices and associated software has become disparate and incompatible. This has created a problem at the doctor's end where the doctor typically has to maintain multiple incompatible software and hardware interfaces to accommodate the various monitoring devices used by patients. The software and interface incompatibility has also led to doctors not being able to uniformly store measurement data from different devices in a uniform or single repository. Furthermore, patients may not have access to a computer or the appropriate software to allow them to use the data to manage their condition or to have collaborative discussions about the data with their doctors.
Therefore, it would be beneficial to patients, doctors, and other entities in the healthcare industry, to facilitate and standardize the processes of obtaining, transmitting, processing, and storing data from self-monitoring measuring devices. For example, for many patients, an improvement would be to use only a telephone outlet rather than a computer to transmit data to a doctor or other healthcare provider. Furthermore, in cases where the patient is using more than one type of self-monitoring device, it would be beneficial if all the devices were compatible with an intermediate, data-linking device that performed as a common interface or data conduit for transmitting data over a telephone line or network. It would also be beneficial to patients and other entities if a patient could effectively transmit data to additional healthcare professionals, such as nurses or pharmacists, wherein these individuals are authorized to access the patient data and work with the patient's primary care physician in managing the patient's condition. Therefore, it is beneficial to have a common, comprehensive database capable of receiving downloaded information from all devices without respect to proprietary restrictions. Furthermore, it is important that the sharing of access to this personal health data be controlled by the patient at all times.
From the doctor's perspective, it would be greatly beneficial to have access to a common central data repository storing all his patients' personal healthcare data. In addition, accessing a personal health data repository and processing engine should be secure, efficient and cost-effective for the doctor, the patient and other professionals. It would also be desirable to encourage participation by the doctor, patient, and other entities in the healthcare industry, such as pharmaceutical, life science, and health insurance companies, in actively utilizing a system and network in which patients and doctors benefit. A significant benefit of a common, comprehensive database to the doctor and generally to the healthcare industry would be the availability of depersonalized aggregate analysis of the data to study trends across patient populations based on disease, demographics, or other stored parameters. Finally, it would be desirable to better educate the patient and provide more frequent instructions and guidance from doctors regarding a patient's specific health conditions and goals, thereby enabling the patient to be more effective in improving his health condition.